Marianne:
Why does the DSK Affair still fascinate
to such an extent?
Stéphane Zagdanski:
Probably because on May 14, 2011, DSK became, in spite of himself, the symbol
of the insanity of the contemporary world.
A polymorphous madness, become “globalised,” as it is said, with its
political derangements, its media deliriums or “economic horrors,” to quote
Rimbaud, in which we all—without exception—flounder about at this very moment. The at once lunatic and exemplary character
of the Sofitel incident was clear to me when I learned that the media covered
with which it had been favored surpassed coverage of September 11, 2001.
I
understood it was a “tremendous and villainous ensorcellment,” in the sense
Artaud would diagnose it. The world
today is on its road to ruin; the planet is undergoing its own perdition. DSK, with his bogus liberal science, the smooth-talking
great financier devoid of feeling, with his ever-present spin doctors, with his
frenzied, grotesque sexuality, with his at the same time good-natured and
cynical thoughtlessness, literally “incarnated” this systematic suicidal way in
which the world operates. That he ended
up crashing and burning is thus not surprising.
Marx
was still too optimistic when he foresaw capitalism’s self-destruction for
which would be substituted a post-revolutionary humanity. Certainly if, today, neo-liberalism has
ignited the fuse of its implosion, in practice it is, alas, bringing the entire
planet down into the crater produced by that implosion.
The
DSK Affair therefore possesses all the ingredients of the kind of apocalypse we
are living, but in the form of a farce, of course.
Was it difficult to write about an on-going
court case, with protagonists who appear in your novel using their own names
and to whom you give thoughts and words which sometimes are very violent?
Truthfully, Seuil’s lawyers have been
very busy. (Laughter) But, basically, I do
not feel bothered by this kind of fear.
When I write, I am in a trance; the people of whom I speak exist only on
the page. It is an unconsciousness in me
that verges on innocence. I thereby keep
reality that much nearer. I prolifically
researched each protagonist in this improbable affair. All the biographical details I relate about
DSK, for example, are true: his passion for chess, the earthquake he
experienced in Agadir [Morocco] when he was ten years old, which, in my view,
explains that his whole life is haunted by earthquake. Whence the cataclysms which punctuate this
career, right up to “l’affaire de New York,” which comes to a close with the
earthquake which actually occurred on the East Coast of the United States, a
rare occurrence, August 23, 2011, at the very second the Public Prosecutor,
Cyrus Vance, was attempting to explain to the press why his case was falling
apart. All this is known and
verifiable. By contrast, freely entering
into the thoughts of DSK, of Nafissatou Diallo, of [Benjamin] Brafman, of
[Nicolas] Sarkozy and of others, I gave myself the ultimate prerogative of the
novelist who “guess through walls,” as Proust said.
You did not want to dig deeply into the
relationship between Dominque Strauss-Kahn and his wife Anne Sinclair, contrary
to what others did, who behaved like the tabloids, sometimes even like
pornographers…
Indeed,
and for two reasons: First, I wanted to
use only published sources. Anne
Sinclair has never spoken about her relationship. Even Nafissatou Diallo was more talkative
about the seven minutes she spent with DSK than Anne Sinclair was during their
twenty years of living together. The
second reason is that to be in love with this man was her right, a right to be
respected and that no one may judge.
Anne Sinclair comported herself very nobly throughout this affair. There is nothing in it to ridicule, nothing
to sully or to tarnish.
Nonetheless,
I did not spare this character her bad relationship to Picasso. I even made it the symbol of her
destiny. When one day the genius of Guernica
said to her mother, “I want to paint your daughter; I see eyes everywhere on
her”, the teenager categorically refused.
The die was cast: blind of soul, Anne Sinclair would be destined to have
all eyes upon her. A television star,
the most-famous-look-in-France incarnate, the target of every gaze, she herself
would be condemned to not want to see. All the same, it must be remembered what
this woman represented for the country until the 1990’s at least. Her blue eyes were a true “mythology,” in the
sense Barthes means it.
In the book, you give two versions of the
facts. In the one version, DSK is guilty
of rape; in the other version, it was an assignation with a prostitute that
went wrong. What is your private
conviction? One has to ask when you are
so closely interested in what happened…
I
gave two versions, while very precisely describing the scene at the Sofitel,
precisely so as to not have to choose.
In a certain way, both are true, because a world in which such an affair
can happen no longer participates in the classic domains of truth and lie. My plan was never to conduct the secret
counter-investigation of the DSK Affair.
Rather, I attempted to imagine how literature, that is to say, the
thinking word, could break the universal ensorcellment from which such a
nightmare was born.
Interview for Marianne by Aude Lancelin
English
translation by Robert G. Margolis
